Consciousness is related to sentience, or is an awareness of one's existence. However, it remains mysterious and controversial, despite being a familiar aspect of our lives. Sometimes, it is synonymous with the mind, and at other times, an aspect of mind. It is related to cognition, experience, feeling, perception, awareness, and self-awareness. A great debate is about whether only humans are conscious, all animals, or even the whole universe.
Michio Kaku, frustrated with everyone "debating ghosts", came up with a definition of consciousness in his book The Future of the Mind.
"It is the sum total of all the feedback loops necessary to create a model, a model of yourself in space and time in society.
The simplest level of consciousness is a thermostat. A thermostat has one feedback loop, and it creates a model of itself in temperature. It regulates the temperature in a room. So I say that a thermostat has one unit of consciousness.
A plant has maybe 10 units of consciousness. It’s conscious of its temperature, moisture, direction of the sun, oxygen, carbon dioxide content, a few sensors that give you maybe 10 feedback loops.
The next level of consciousness is a reptile. A reptile has an understanding of space, but not much more. It has to understand where the food is located, where its potential mates are, where its enemies are. So it has to be able to create feedback loops that understand space, its location in space. So I call that level one. Level one consciousness is the thousands of neurons necessary to create a representation of space for a reptile. That’s called the reptilian brain.
Then at the center of the brain, because the brain evolves from the back to the front, the back of the brain is the reptilian brain. The center of the brain evolved later, and that’s the monkey brain, the limbic system, and that governs consciousness in society.
So what is human consciousness? What feedback loops does the human brain give a human that differs from monkeys, differs from reptiles? That is the key question of which I have an answer. The front part of your brain is what distinguishes us from the animals. And what does that brain do? It creates a model of yourself in time. It is a time machine. It daydreams. It imagines worlds that don’t exist.
A dog cannot understand the meaning of tomorrow. Your dog understands space. That’s the reptilian brain, the back of your brain. Your dog understands society, that is the society of dogs. That’s the center of the brain. But the front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is not well-developed in dogs. So dogs cannot daydream, and don't need to.
Humans on the other hand, constantly daydream. We can’t help it. We’re constantly imagining, what am I going to do tomorrow? What is the best path to go? It’s constantly creating alternate worlds of consciousness.
So I say that there are three levels of consciousness.
- There is location / geometric consciousness / spatial consciousness. That is the reptile.
- There is social consciousness of a monkey, or a wolf in a wolf pack.
- There is temporal consciousness, which is what humans do.
That is my definition of human consciousness. Human consciousness is the sum total of all feedback loops of a human assessing its place in time, essentially the future, and constantly daydreaming about what one can do in the future."
Note that daydreaming is a stream of consciousness that detaches from current, external tasks when attention drifts and dissociates to a more personal and internal direction. This is different to dreaming, where images, ideas, emotions, and sensations occur involuntarily in the mind during certain stages of sleep. Animals can dream, but only humans can daydream.
Humans' daydreams are linked to their imagination, the ability to mentally envision a tool or concept and then summon it into reality. All modern things originally only existed as thought forms inside someone’s mind. They were all once inert pieces of quantum possibility floating in the abstract realm of human imagination until we evolved the means to pursue their creation. If we only made choices regarding the external world, we would still be operating as apes, reacting to our bodily needs like sleep, warmth, hunger, etc. By internalizing, we became curious apes and were able to manifest our thoughts to manipulate reality.
Daydreaming is in the realm of dreams, or surreality. This is outside of spacetime and dimensions. Does this mean that human consciousness is stored elsewhere, and there is a physical connection between your mind and an out-of-mind, out-of-body storage?